Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) is really, a general philosophy. There are MOM software solutions out there. There are books describing the ideals of effective manufacturing operations management. But, in the end, there isn’t just one operations management definition. It’s simply a catch-all term for how to effectively run a manufacturing company.
To put it into perspective, Dick Willis, a partner of Mingo, was asked to describe MOM, and he said, “It’s all of the paper and spreadsheets you have spread across your office used to run the plant. Essentially, MOM is what you’re doing to deliver a product to a customer.”
MES and all of the other tools are simply what you’re using to make it happen.
So, let’s dive into manufacturing operations management (MOM) vs. Mingo.
What is Manufacturing Operations Management?
MOM is the spreadsheets, the paper, the ERP system, an MES, a manufacturing analytics solution, emails going back forth, and so much more. It’s everything that’s going on inside and outside of every plant. This is the overarching concept of manufacturing operations management – managing a factory, its production, and overall operations.
What’s interesting is that people have only digitized part of it. Historically, you have the back office planning functions in the ERP and then you have MES which is real-time execution, but what you’re missing is that in-between. What happened in the middle?
This idea of the in-between is where Mingo falls. For example, this goes back to the Mingo philosophy on scheduling and why we saw a need for the feature. The ERP only takes you so far, and you can’t jump right into producing stuff. Someone has to create the schedule in spreadsheets and paper to track where it’s all going. You also have all of your whiteboards, communication boards, day by hour boards, whatever name you refer to them as, all of that on the floor telling everyone how you’re doing. You have quality targets, safety targets, production targets. Some of that lives in MES or ERP, but not all of it. There’s a huge gap.
Mingo closes the gap. It’s not really a matter of manufacturing operations management vs. Mingo, but how Mingo helps complete the full puzzle. We take the most common parts from the MES, basically the non-overcomplicated parts of MES. We take over some of the ERP functions. And, then we add in analytics to provide visibility into everything a manufacturer is tracking.
The whole idea behind the MOM strategy is that it gives you full visibility across everything related to the plant. If you were to put this into 1 software solution, well, to be honest, it would be incredibly difficult because it could include a lot of pieces. In addition to the ERP, MES, and analytics, it could include some of your design, quality, or maintenance software, all of which would be very difficult to tie into one system. You just can’t. It would be too specific.
This is the argument why MOM as software would be virtually impossible. In reality, there aren’t many solutions out there that claim to MOM software because it’s just too much.
To a certain extent, we’ll admit, your MOM could be a business intelligence solution like Power BI or Tableau that sits on top of all of the other systems. If you look at manufacturers around the globe, all of these big companies pull Mingo data, along with ERP and sales data into Power BI or Tableau, to get the full picture of the whole company. The same could be true at a plant level.
You may not necessarily be looking at sales data, but looking at your manufacturing information, potentially your maintenance information, your quality data, all together in a single screen while providing visibility into goals and metrics across the plant. But, even then, it’s not one software solution doing all of this. It’s a combination of software.
It’s really why we believe MOM is a philosophy or a strategy above all else. It allows you to put the pieces of the puzzle together, how all of those software or planning strategies work together, to really provide the manufacturer full visibility into the company.
This is really what the strategy entails, and is not so much a comparison between manufacturing operations management (MOM) vs. Mingo.
